First Day of College!

I did it. I am doing it. I'm in it. I have started. Yes! Today I started school. In a little over a year I will have completed a lifelong goal of getting my degree. What the degree is in is not that important to me now. I just want to be able to say I have a Bachelor's degree. I feel like it will open more doors to me in terms of advancement in my career. More importantly, I am hoping that it will give me a sense of confidence that I lack. Many people do not know that I did not complete college because I have been ashamed of that fact. Now I can admit it freely because I am on track to obtaining a degree.

When my children were little, I worked part time and went to school part time to get my AA. When I had to return to work full time I stopped going to school because I could not work, attend classes and be the parent that I wanted to be. So I decided many years ago to wait until the kids were out of the house to go back to school. This was a promise I made to myself and now I am fulfilling it.

I am attending Ashford University, which has an extensive online program, and getting a degree in Organizational Management. So far, my classmates and I have been winding our way around the school's web pages, trying to familiarize ourselves with this new way of classroom learning. The first assignment was to post a short bio (introduction) on the discussion board and respond to two other people's bios. (This is a college homework assignment??) I read everyone else's bio and wondered what I had signed up for. Thinking I was joining a community of academics, where I would be challenged was not what I encountered. Casual writing born from emails and text messaging has become such the norm that I worry that people can't type correspondence without adding an emoticon. Reading everyone's bio made me feel like the freak. I just don't fit in. I cannot relate to so many of the introductions where they described themselves as Christian. I just don't see why that has to be interjected into every conversation, whether written or spoken. It is a form of emoticon, that somehow ends up hanging like a displaced punctuation mark at the end of every paragraph.

Maybe it is me. Maybe I just am too serious. I would have never thought of putting "Go Chargers" in my introduction, but a lot of people did, replacing Chargers with their favorite sports team(s). I am not in the military and I am not married to someone in the military. This is another point of difference between many of my classmates and me.

I'm not attending class to meet other people, but I am hoping to be challenged. Just getting all the assignments done will present its own challenge, but I want to be intellectually stimulated.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes. Wish me luck.